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Cake ,Edmund: Downtown Puff |
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Much of the material on the album was devised while Cake (Ed McWilliams) was living in a third-floor studio space on Gore Street in Auckland's red-light district. This particular audio environment - with its incessant street brawls, strip club pop and Doobie Brothers hits played by the covers band in the 24-hour bar downstairs - provided a peculiar backdrop for the evolution of delicate instrumentals on tracks such as 'Airshow' and 'Watching Me'. It was here too that Cake recorded the one-take improvised vocal for My Son the Harpist, an intentionally free-form lyric which reveals itself to be the story of a complex father/son relationship in a fictitious Pacific village. Since demolished by a property delveloper called Carpark 80, as part of the dock area clean-up initiated by the Britomart transport project, this setting also provided lyrical inspiration for 'Oh Baby Bear' - an ode to Auckland's outmoded transport system. Although the album is being released as a solo project, it represents a multitude of musical collaborations. Each track was developed as a separate entity and most musicians were only involved in one or two tracks. As the album was produced and recorded by Cake many of the people who worked on the album over the five years heard the finished product for the first time when Downtown Puff was released. Two of these collaborators are Geoff Maddock and Joel Wilton, the other sides of the creative triangle which made up the short-lived Flying Nun phenomenon Bressa Creeting Cake. Since the dissolution of the band soon after the release of their acclaimed (self-titled) album in 1997 Geoff and Joel have found popular and critical success with Goldenhorse.
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